Thursday, May 10, 2018

“Etc., etc.”

Beverly Cleary (then Bunn) is now a student in the School of Librarianship, University of Washington. It’s noon:

As we ate our meager lunches and watched drama students, scripts in hand, emote over cups of coffee with soggy napkins folded in their saucers sopping up spills, we discussed the finer points of cataloging and invented an imaginary series of books for our instructor to catalog: six volumes, each with a different editor or sometimes two, one of whom wrote under a pseudonym and the other under her maiden name, some volumes translated from foreign languages and requiring translator cards, each volume with a preface by a different author, etc., etc. This sent us into gales of laughter as each of us thought of an addition to make the assignment more difficult. Such is the sense of humor of librarians. We also had earnest discussions on the finer points of grammar.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).
Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

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